Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2020 15:42:20 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> To: "freebsd-arch@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org>, FreeBSD Current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org> Subject: APM BIOS set to go in FreeBSD Message-ID: <CANCZdfpzpiAq-NrHRYSe0hS140Hk9rJ0jFVNe8VkH%2B8Sim1CRw@mail.gmail.com>
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Greetings, APM BIOS support will likely be removed from FreeBSD for FreeBSD 13. This was once quite important for LAPTOP users. However, it is now no longer relevant. It stopped being supported around the time that ACPI started to be released for laptops. This was around the Pentium 200MHz laptop generation, give or take. ACPI was released in 1996 to replace APM, and had largely done so by 2000. As such, this is 20-year obsolete technology. The current APM code has been basically untested for a long time. So it's unclear if the many blind changes to it have broken it or not. In addition, there are some timekeeping improvements I'd like to make to the kernel that APM is standing in the way of. I have no APM laptops that are still working (my last one I retired in 1998 or so and is no longer powering on). Rather than make yet another set of blind changes to a technology that's no longer relevant and surely completely unused, I'd like to retire APM in 13.0. To that end, I'm looking for actual users of this APM that have used the technology successfully in FreeBSD 12.0 or newer. Are there any such users left? Warner
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